As I mentioned yesterday, I’m heading to Davidson College (my alma mater) over the weekend for my husband’s graduation. It’s got me thinking about how my experiences at Davidson have lead me to where I am now, designing knit and crochet.
Yesterday I told you about the Neelecraft Center, my very first LYS. Today I want to tell you about the second of three things that heavily influenced where I am now. The first was the Neelecraft Center, and the second would be Davidson’s Arts program. You see I was an english major and my senior year I had fulfilled most of my general requirements. That meant I was taking classes mostly toward my major. As things happened, my first semester Senior year I found myself taking three reading-heavy English classes. There were weeks where I was reading nearly three books a week, plus associated articles with the text we were studying.
It was right about that time that Lauren Cunningham, one of my close friends and an art major, told me I should take a sculpture class. (She said this, actually, as we were sharpening pencils for one of her really cool sculptures.) I was dubious, but a few weeks later we were working on another one of her sculptures and it was so much fun I decided ‘what the heck?’
Sculpture was amazing. I’ve always liked to create things with my hands, and here I was being given the tools to be able to do that. I learned how to work with wood, weld with metal, and cast in lost wax. I got to play with plaster, and best of all, I was constantly incorporating crochet and knitting into my work.
Some of my sculptures were pretty weird. I made a hand that’s dressed up like a clown – it was made in a rush on an impulse, inspired my the “hand anteaters” my father used to make when I was a child.
I also made a piece titled “Rebellion against the Sampler.” The piece was inspired partly by the then incipient Crochet Coral Reef Project, partly by scrumbling, and partly by a desire to see just how far I could push crochet. It inspired some rather visceral reactions from my peer reviewers, including one student who claimed it looked like something out of “Dr. Seuss trying to eat my foot.” At my professor’s encouragement I entered it into the student art exhibition, and won second place – beating people who were art majors! It was the first time it occurred to me that I might actually be good at the sculpture and art thing, instead of just enjoying the heck out if it.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the third things at Davidson that brought me to where I am now. Stay tuned!
